Google Rolls Out Twitter Replay Feature

Since Google introduced real-time search last December, the search engine has added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz to live updates on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. Today, the Official Google Blog introduced a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets.

Dylan Casey, Google's Product Manager for Real-Time Search, said in a post, "Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and 'replay' what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click 'Show options' on the search results page, then select 'Updates.' The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there's a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period."

Get it? Got it? Good.

Casey added, "By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens' retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode."

He said that the replay feature is rolling out now and will be available globally in English within the next couple days. If you want to try it now, click on this special link to see the relative volume of activity on Twitter about Obama.

Initially, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, but soon you'll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.

About the author

Greg Jarboe is president of SEO-PR, which provides search engine optimization, public relations, video marketing, and social media marketing services. He's the author of "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day," a faculty member at Rutgers University and Market Motive, as well as a frequent speaker at SES conferences.